Man Tells Of Death Struggle With Wife

February 14, 1990|By LISA OCKER, Staff Writer

The struggle was for the trigger, the knife, then the rifle again. When it was over, Tony and Denise Coviello sank together, as if in slow motion, to the kitchen floor of their West Boca Raton townhouse, Tony Coviello testified on Tuesday.

Stabbed a dozen times about the neck, chest, arms and flank, Denise Coviello, 34, was mortally injured. Tony Coviello, 39, was uninjured. After calling 911 to report stabbing his wife, he was charged with first-degree murder.

For three hours on Tuesday, Coviello tried to convince 12 Palm Beach County Circuit Court jurors that he was defending himself when he killed his bride of a year.

As it ended on the evening of May 26, 1989, the rifle was in her hands, he said, the knife in his. She squeezed the trigger, he thought, and he plunged the knife, he said.

Coviello remembers stabbing her twice. His memory fails after that.

His attorney asked him to describe his thoughts as he looked at his wife on the floor.

Coviello softly cleared his throat. He did not move. He did not raise his eyes.

``Tony, listen to me. Hear me?`` attorney Nelson Bailey prodded.

``Um hum,`` came the answer, then seconds of silence.

``I had to, I was going to lay down with her,`` Coviello finally managed.

``And you didn`t?`` Bailey asked.

``No. I don`t think I would`ve got back up,`` he replied.

The argument between Tony and Denise Coviello began the day before her death, it was testified. Like many others, it centered on cocaine, Coviello said, and was perpetuated by another woman.

Denise Coviello had a June 1988 charge of sale of cocaine pending against her.

Tony Coviello filed for divorce two weeks before her arrest. He took her back after posting her bail, threatening to revoke it to keep her from ``going off`` on cocaine, he said.

Denise Coviello was on a three-day binge when Coviello decided to go out with a woman named Grace, he said. He returned in the middle of the night to check on Denise, though, and the fighting began and continued the next day.

At one point, he said she swung a pool cue at his head and he hit her in the face, dazing her long enough to wrap duct tape around her head to try to ``restrain her.`` The tape only made her ``flip out,`` though, so he cut it off, he said, putting her in a headlock to dial 911.

Deputies persuaded Coviello to leave, but she beeped him and he returned home and started looking for her cocaine, he said. That was when she armed herself with her .22-caliber rifle and a hunting knife the family used to open letters, he said.

Coviello said he tried to talk his wife into putting the gun down, approaching slowly. He did not see the knife, he said. As he saw her go for the trigger, he grabbed the muzzle and thrust the gun upward then tried to pry her finger from the trigger, he said. She let go of the trigger and grabbed the knife from the kitchen counter, he said. He wrestled the knife from her, but lost the gun again, he said. Denise Coviello went for the trigger, he said, ``and at that point, I stabbed her.``